I am standing inside a one-room museum on Christie Street, in what is now Edison, NJ (formerly Menlo Park), looking out at the first road in the world to be lit by electric lights. Thomas Edison lived here during a flurry of invention, production and patenting from 1876-1882. Today, the structures of the workshop and the Edison residential home, as well as those first incandescent bulb lamps, are gone.
This estate was only briefly inhabited by the iconic genius, but boasts the sites of some of his most famous discoveries. Come here to visit the spot where a bamboo filament made the first incandescent bulb shine and the desk where Edison tinkered with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone enough for it to work better, more consistently.
This is a museum dedicated to those six early yet heady years in the career of Thomas Edison, with a heavy emphasis on his start as a child impresario.